Many people seem to have trouble accepting that North Korea really is building nuclear weapons. It seems so incongruous, this backward little peninsular nightmare as a nuclear power. But North Korea has conducted five nuclear tests, with progressively larger yields, since 2006. And now the North Koreans claim to have tested a nuclear weapon small enough to arm a missile. Do we believe them? After all, this is North Korea we’re talking about.

North Korea’s propaganda apparatus is pretty proud. In March, Kim Jong Un, the country’s leader, posed with a mock-up of one of the bombs, the same design that North Korea now claims to have tested and intends to deploy on its arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles. “It is very gratifying to see the nuclear warheads with the structure of mixed charge adequate for prompt thermonuclear reaction,” he said then.

How to assess the merit of these claims? One seemingly oblique but constructive way is to look at the fifth nuclear tests of other countries—the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China. These five fifth tests are a fairly telling set. By their fifth tests, all five countries had demonstrated the technologies to reduce the size of first-generation weapons, and were well on their way to building thermonuclear weapons. Their scientists were quite competent, and their place in the world as nuclear powers widely acknowledged. So why hold North Korea to a different standard? Viewed through the lens of these past tests, it’s hard to escape the reality that North Korea is, indeed, a real nuclear power.

The United States: Enewetak Atoll, April 30, 1948

In April 1948, the United States had a nuclear monopoly. But the Soviet Union was developing its own nuclear weapons, and the Americans were certainly moving beyond the cumbersome devices they’d dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The fifth U.S. nuclear test occurred in 1948, the second of a series of three nuclear explosions at Enewetak Atoll as part of Operation Sandstone. The test, known as “Yoke,” was a 49-kiloton explosion—the largest explosion to date, and a fairly fascinating bomb. Yoke’s implosion design was the first to use highly enriched uranium, something that is of interest to North Korea today. And it was one of the series of tests that confirmed the concept of the “levitated pit,” a design essential to reducing the size of U.S. nuclear weapons so they could fit atop ballistic missiles.

This was a major coup for the U.S. nuclear-weapons program. The bomb the United States had dropped on Nagasaki weighed more than 10,000 pounds. The Sandstone series test opened up a route to reducing that size. A little airspace between the tamper and the fissile core allows the shockwave from the conventional explosives in the bomb to hit harder and more efficiently squeeze the core of fissile material. This design concept was classified for decades, although the physicist Ted Taylor famously spilled the beans when he explained it to the New Yorker journalist John McPhee this way: “When you hammer a nail, what do you do? Do you put the hammer on the nail and push?”

The North Koreans have almost certainly adopted a levitated pit in their own designs.

The Soviet Union: Semipalatinsk (now Kazakhstan), August 23, 1953

The Soviets were behind in 1948, but they were hell-bent on catching up. And going second had its advantages, since Moscow could sit back and let the United States pursue dead ends, while copying approaches that the Americans had bled millions of dollars to confirm.

The fifth Soviet nuclear test—known in the United States as Joe 5, after you-know-who—was of a compact device that could be delivered by aircraft or fitted to a ballistic missile. The Soviet name for the test was Tatyana. This was the Soviets’ first “tactical” nuclear weapon, and it remained in service until 1966. The Soviets were also well on their way toward thermonuclear weapons, having demonstrated the burning of thermonuclear fuel in a so-called Sloika device tested just before Tatyana.

The Soviets were, in many ways, further along by their fifth test than the Americans had been by theirs, which makes sense. They were able to watch the United States to see what might work and what might not. As a result, they had a compact nuclear-weapons design, as well as an early thermonuclear design.

Britain: Montebello Islands, Australia June 19, 1956

By its fifth test, Britain was moving toward thermonuclear weapons. The second of two tests in the Mosaic series, its fifth test was similar to the fourth Soviet test—it involved a device using layers of thermonuclear material. As Lorna Arnold and Mark Brian Smith wrote in Britain, Australia and the Bomb, the Mosaic series “made essential contributions” to Britain’s development of thermonuclear weapons. British scientist William Penney said the purpose of the tests was “to confirm that we have not made a fundamental mistake.” They had not. The British would test a thermonuclear weapon in 1957, ultimately pushing the United States to resume nuclear-weapons cooperation with Britain, cooperation that continues to this day.

Mosaic helped the United States come to regard the British as a full-fledged nuclear power, a precedent that might pique Kim Jong Un’s interest.

France: In Eker, Algeria, November 7, 1961

France’s fifth test was a science experiment. Its first four tests, conducted in the atmosphere over Algeria, had demonstrated a compact nuclear device weighing 1,200 kilograms. With Algerian independence looming, France moved its nuclear testing underground, to a location near the village of In Eker.

The fifth French test, code-named “Agate,” was the first of a series of 18 underground nuclear tests at the site through 1966, when local opposition forced France to move its testing to the South Pacific. In the 1960s, the ability to conduct nuclear tests underground was considered a sign of technical sophistication. French officials were justly proud of the achievement, which would elude the Chinese in the years to come. Of course, underground testing no longer seems to be the challenge it once was. All of North Korea’s tests have been conducted underground.

China: Lop Nor, December 28, 1966

The final fifth test was very nearly a thermonuclear device. China’s fifth nuclear test was a “principles” test of a thermonuclear device. By this point, China had already tested fission devices dropped by aircraft and carried by a missile, as well as a layer-cake device like the one involved in the fifth British test. China’s next test, in June 1967, would be a massive, staged-thermonuclear weapon with a yield of more than three megatons.

The notion of Mao Zedong’s China developing nuclear weapons, then moving swiftly to thermonuclear weapons, certainly grabbed the world’s attention in the 1960s. Mao’s China was considered a sort of backward oddity, a country with no business developing the most sophisticated nuclear weapons, let alone doing so in less than three years—and before a European power like France. Thermonuclear weapons were incongruous with the popular image of China in the 1960s. Sound familiar?

Although each of these countries made different choices over what to prioritize, by their fifth nuclear tests each had dramatically reduced the size of nuclear weapons from the giant “Fat Man” bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki, and was well on its way to developing thermonuclear weapons with yield ranges in the megatons. Five nuclear tests is quite a lot, and the later countries like France and China were able to move quickly by following the path set forth by the United States and Soviet Union.

North Korea is coming last, in an era when these technologies are 50 years old and have been demonstrated repeatedly by other nuclear powers. In this context, the country’s boasts about building nuclear weapons small enough to arm missiles and making use of thermonuclear materials don’t seem outlandish at all.

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The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

Here are some readers with extra elements on this discussion—political, cultural, international. First, an American reader on the interaction of current concepts of masculinity and the nearly all-male population of mass gun murderers:

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a “safe haven” law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family—nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study explores a strange paradox: In countries that empower women, they are less likely to choose math and science professions.

Though their numbers are growing, only 27 percent of all students taking the AP Computer Science exam in the United States are female. The gender gap only grows worse from there: Just 18 percent of American computer-science college degrees go to women. This is in the United States, where many college men proudly describe themselves as “male feminists” and girls are taught they can be anything they want to be.

Meanwhile, in Algeria, 41 percent of college graduates in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and math—or “STEM,” as it’s known—are female. There, employment discrimination against women is rife and women are often pressured to make amends with their abusive husbands.

According to a report I covered a few years ago, Jordan, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates were the only three countries in which boys are significantly less likely to feel comfortable working on math problems than girls are. In all of the other nations surveyed, girls were more likely to say they feel “helpless while performing a math problem.”

A man named François is a professor in Paris. He is a scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, an obscure 19th-century author who, in his later years, converted to Catholicism in an epiphany. François is the hero, or rather anti-hero, of French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s Submission. François is listless—even his attitude toward sex is uninspired, as if it’s an activity like any other, perhaps like playing tennis on a Sunday, but probably with less excitement. There is too much freedom and too many choices, and sometimes he’d rather just die.

The world around him, though, is changing. It is 2022. After a charismatic Islamist wins the second round of the French presidential elections against the right-wing Marine Le Pen (after gaining the support of the Socialists), a Muslim professor, himself a convert, attempts to persuade François to make the declaration of faith. “It’s submission,” the professor tells him. “The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.”